Well Said: A new treatment for depression
On this week's podcast, Flavio Frohlich discusses how low-level electric stimulation on the brain can be used to treat mental illnesses and chronic pain.
Flavio Frohlich has always been interested in the human brain.
He became even more interested in its inner-workings after learning how brain cells produce a small amount of electricity, which results in “rhythms” in the brain.
Even more fascinating was his discovery that rhythms responded to electric stimulation.
When he arrived at Carolina in 2011, he recruited a team of students and academic colleagues to investigate the possibility that small electric charges could alter the brain rhythm of patients with schizophrenia.
“There are all these different things that you can choose when you do brain stimulation, which you can’t really with medication,” said Frohlich, an associate professor. “With stimulation, millisecond-to-millisecond you can define and individualize how you want to stimulate.”
Now, the team is applying the findings from that study to patients with depression.
On this week’s episode of Well Said, Frohlich discusses his team’s research and how low-level electric stimulation on the brain can be used to treat chronic pain and mental illnesses.
Listen to the episode on SoundCloud or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Read a transcript of this episode.
Join us every Wednesday for Well Said to hear from students, faculty, staff and alumni. Each week, you’ll learn what’s going on in classrooms, labs and around campus, and how it pertains to the local, national and international headlines.
